Anybody can become a healthy bastard! Fitness, food and techniques to go from fat to fit.

Monthly Archives: January 2012

Just wanted to highlight this little tidbit in the Vancouver Sun which reiterates something I’ve believed for a while now: it’s not so much important where you get your calories from, so much as how many you get, if you want to lose weight.

Bray, of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and his colleagues randomly assigned several hundred overweight or obese people to one of four diets: average protein, low fat and higher carbs; high protein, low fat, and higher carbs; average protein, high fat and lower carbs; or high protein, high fat and lower carbs.

At six months, people had lost more than nine pounds of fat and close to five pounds of lean mass, but some of this was regained by the two-year mark.

People were able to maintain a weight loss of more than eight pounds after two years. Included in that was a nearly three-pound loss of abdominal fat, a reduction of more than seven per cent.

The team found no differences in weight loss or fat reductions between the diets.

Mainly saying, it doesn’t matter where you get your calories, just as long as you stay under your caloric limits. Now that being said, different diets will have an effect on other health factors, like heart health, cholesterol, insulin resistance, and so on. But for straight weight loss, it’s less calories, not less fat.

This last week was a busy one around here at Healthy Bastard. Exams to write, social engagements, the constant work of life…it can get overwhelming. Because I had procrastinated earlier this month, I was under some deadlines for school, and I had to choose between the gym and my education.

I chose education. That meant I missed three days of my routine this week, two lifting days and one running day. Oof. Does this mean that I’m no longer a gym goer? Does it mean I lack discipline? No, it doesn’t.

One of the things that everybody runs into when changing their diet or their exercise regimen is interruptions. So here you are, you have this great plan to eat right every day of the week, to hit the gym three or four times a week, without fail, and to keep it up. No excuses! No retreat!

We all talk like that, either to our friends or just to ourselves. But the reality is that eventually, life will outpace you. You will not be able to hit the gym on Monday morning, like you have been doing for three weeks. You will not be able to go grocery shopping and start your week off with a full meal plan and your fridge stocked up. Sometimes, life just gets busy.

I’ve been the guy who has started and stopped routines in the past. You work so hard, for weeks or months, and then you get knocked off your game, your streak gets wiped out, and boom, that’s it; your motivation is gone. This is the point where many people quit; where they say, “Okay, I’ve had enough. I’m just the sort of person that can do this.”

And every time, they’re wrong.

You see, even the best athletes know that discipline isn’t about never falling down; it’s about standing back up again.

So what do you do when your routine is a mess, you’re behind on your meal plan, or you’ve just blown your calorie limit?

So I promised in my previous post to talk about how I’ve been approaching this whole lose-weight-and-become-a-healthy-bastard thing. However, I was a bit puzzled, initially, by how to break it all down. For those of us who are looking to shed the pounds and haven’t spent a lot of time learning about how to lose weight and build muscle, this can be the most confusing part of the process. But as far as I have discovered, weight loss and muscle gain consists of five discrete factors that combine to form a fit and healthy lifestyle. These are all big topics, so I’m breaking this notion into five posts. This post is about diet.

Healthy Bastard’s Road to Fitness Part 1: 80% of Weight Loss is Diet

Where you’ll join me on my journey from fatass to fitness. The goal of this blog is to document the diet, fitness techniques, and tools I use to shed the weight and become one of those fit sons-of-bitches whom you pass on the street and say, “look at that healthy bastard. God damn him.”

But first, some backgrounder, if you don’t mind.

Who are you, and why are you becoming fit?

My name is Steven, and I used to be a pretty heavy guy. I’m 6′ 2″, and 33 years-old. At the beginning of November, 2011, when I decided to start getting in shape, I weighed 225lbs, and was pretty sedentary due to being a full-time student. This is a far cry from January 2010, where I rang in at my all-time heaviest at 237.5lbs.

So in early November, after an October full of Canadian thanksgiving dinners, beer nights, halloween candy, and one too many essay-writing sessions with my formerly-trusty study partner, Jim Beam, I started to feel terrible. Really bad, in fact. I felt bloated, couldn’t sleep at night, and was often craving sugar. And after attending an Italian-themed birthday potluck for a friend, where I pigged out on spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, and so on, it went from bad to miserable.

The night of the potluck, I was awoken every 3 hours with night sweats, was constantly thirsty, and felt awful. Now, I would expect this, to an extent, after a huge and heavy meal. But the problem was this lasted 36 hours. I didn’t feel okay again — I’m not talking about feeling normal — for two days.

So I went to a walk-in clinic on November 15th,, because I didn’t have a doctor at the time. He sent me for a diabetes screen. What followed were 48 hours of intense stress, while I waited for the results, and more misery. I cut my diet back, drastically, and not in a healthy way, just because I was worried about being or becoming diabetic. I googled frantically about everything blood sugar related — diabetes, glucose tolerance, insulin resistance, carb load, glycemic index, and so on.

But the tests came back clean. I was neither diabetic, nor pre-diabetic according to the numbers…a fasting blood sugar of 5.3, where the top end of normal is 5.5. This was a huge, huge personal relief for me, I felt like this was a major wake-up call. I thought, “now is the time to stop eating like an asshole, before I do become a diabetic.”

Changing the Script

So, on November 28th, 2011, I had meeting arranged with a new MD. I hadn’t had a constant MD in years; the one I’d had for a few years, in the early oughts, retired. One I picked up in 2010 packed up and moved to Calgary six months after I saw him for the first time. But my wife insisted I needed some medical supervision, and so found an MD accepting patients, and I made an appointment. But between November 15th,when I took my diabetes screen, and November 28th, I was full of questions of the doctor, still stressing, and had no outlet. So I did what seemed to me to be the best thing: start exercising and stop eating crap.

Because my health was at risk, as far as I was concerned, I immediately started in on diet changes. To start with, I got rid of refined sugars, alcohol, coffee (sugar vector), and tea. I also drastically reduced my intake of cheese, most refined carbs like bread, and other things.

I also started exercise. During this period, I was on a study break from school and getting out to the gym there, where I have a pass, is a long drive. Plus, I didn’t quite know where to start. So I started with body-weight exercises in my living room — squats, pushups, planks, and Y-T-I raises. These were really good for working the stress out; I did these three days a week, while I counted down the days to my doctor’s appointment. I also started light running (which I’ll talk about another time).

In the end, these helped calm the nerves, and prepare my body for more serious fitness. While my diet was not great, and the exercise was not great, both allowed me to feel a little bit better.

The Doctor’s Appointment

I remember walking into the Doctor’s office pretty nervous. I had a copy of my earlier diabetes screen in hand, and was preparing to hear the words from the doctor that “you’re on the way to being diabetic. Get used to it.” I was almost dragging my feet, like I was about to go to the gibbet. But that’s not what happened.

First thing: my doctor is a practicing MD and also a practicing heart surgeon. He was young, maybe 40, visibly fit, and looked like he knew his stuff. The doctor took a look at my test results, and declared that no, I don’t have diabetes. He then looked at me, narrowed his eyes, and said, “But you need to start making healthy choices in your life. You’ll find that we focus a lot on that, in this practice.”

Thereafter, he told me that I needed to change my diet, lose a lot of weight, and exercise every day for a minimum of 30 minutes. And then he suggested that we’d meet up again in February, to revisit my progress.

Since then, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m proud to say that just a little over two months after that first visit to the walk-in clinic, I weigh in at 199lbs, and exercise 5-6 days a week. And I feel great.

In subsequent posts, I’ll be talking more about what I’ve been eating, what my training looks like, what tools I use, and how I stay motivated.